Communication middleware for a web-based game lobby

A game lobby is an online service provided to online game players. Players interact with each other and participate in games through the game lobby. As web technology becomes more advanced, the web is seen as a promising platform for online game lobbies.;In this thesis, we develop a web-based communication middleware for game lobbies using the XML-RPC web service framework. Web-based communication middleware must use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for its communication transport, which is based on the request-reply protocol, and requires all communication to be initiated by the client. This presents a major challenge for realizing the communication middleware as the lobby server needs to send information to the clients at arbitrary time points with minimum latency. We propose a novel Server Push Enabled XML-RPC (SPEX) protocol to address this problem by employing the so-called "long-polling" technique. We also devise a light-weight authentication scheme, called Authenticated XML-RPC. We have implemented SPEX and Authenticated XML-RPC and analyzed the performance characteristics of our implementation. Experiments show that the communication middleware scales well, providing good response time for the kind of real-time interactions that occur typically in an online game lobby setting.